Friday, December 17, 2010

Google has launched a new educational web application called Body Browser that lets people explore the human body like you explore the world on Google Earth. Body Browser lets you zoom, scroll, and search for every muscle, gland, bone, or organ in our body. But before you click on that link, here is a warning: Google Body Browser probably won't load in your browser, because it runs on WebGL which isn’t supported by many browsers at this moment. For now, you have to use either Chrome 9 Beta, Chrome 9 Dev Channel, Chrome Canary Build or Firefox 4 beta. In Chrome 8 (stable) you have to enable WebGL from the about:flags page.

When you open Google Body Browser in one of the above mentioned browsers, you will be greeted with an image of a woman wearing a workout attire. You can zoom in and out of the woman’s body and rotate her using the mouse or the controls on the left side of the screen.

But the most interesting part is the layering tool. Located below the zoom controls, the layering tool lets you peel back layers of the body to see detailed views of the human anatomy, starting at the skin and moving down through the muscles and bone/organs to the cardiovascular and nervous systems. It allows you to zoom in to any area and get the name of a specific body part.

There is a search function too which allows you to locate any part of the body by just typing in the name. Like your usual Google search, Body Browser search auto completes before you finish typing painfully twisted names like “levator labii superioris alaeque nasi”.